Modern law manufactures the very uniformity it claims merely to recognize
Evidence
The proliferation of law deflects any critical or resistant social focus from the state itself, or from state authority and raw state power, Where prevailing social arrangements and relations of power are identified by Reason and represented in their codification through the authority of Law, they are resistible only at risk of irrationality, at risk that is of identification with (or as) “the Primitive.” … For central to modern legal logic is not just to recognize but to create the very likenesses across difference that modern law claims to treat alike. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 77
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the chapter’s recurring theme that laws of racial rule are constituted rather than merely reflected by the state; echoes the standing interest in small acts of decorum versus structural power.
Related
- Modern states rest on a single source of law applied equally, unlike premodern states (similarity 0.83)
- Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories (similarity 0.82)
- Racial states speak through law yet can only institute racial arrangements brutally (similarity 0.82)
- Law converts difference into sameness to enable formal equal treatment (similarity 0.81)
- Late nineteenth-century racial rule became rule through law rather than raw force (similarity 0.80)
- Law both authorizes identities and is itself vulnerable to transgressive redefinition by subjects. (similarity 0.79)
- Law’s universal formalism requires customization to address race, gender, and class. (similarity 0.79)